I don't know who decides this "week" stuff - generally, I assume people who do the marketing make the rules so if I decide I want a Science 2.0 Week I get a few people to promote it and that's that, I have a Science 2.0 Week.
In Andrea Kuszewki's What Happened To Creativity In Science? she mentioned it was open access week and then a commenter on Does Open Access Lead To More Quality Citations? The Data Says ... said the same thing so I looked at his site and, sure enough, it is Open Access Week.
Open access is primarily promoted by evangelists, especially in the early days and, despite being in its fourth decade, open access is only now coming into mainstream play, especially since the evil Democrat trying to squash it in the United States seems to have more pressing problems, like losing 60 seats in the House of Representatives, and has given up on outlawing the public access mandate. That means open access has a chance to become the default rather than the exception.
An Open Access Week can encourage quality stuff and discourage kooks also, we hope - unlike a print journal, which has a fixed cost and therefore requires a very tangible commitment, anyone can set up an online journal and call it peer-reviewed. The Directory of Open Access Journals says there are over 5000 open access journals(1) so they can't all be good but open access is a waypoint to Open Publishing so I am a fan of them all and more good open access journals will marginalize the bad ones. The higher the quality signal, the less obvious the noise.
Publication has always been a cornerstone of the Science 2.0 concept and Paweł Szczęsny has organized an event in Poland for Open Access Week called Nauka 2.0 – praktyczne aspekty rewolucji internetowej w nauce (translation: Science 2.0 – practical aspects of the Internet revolution). He even includes communication and collaboration, two other of the four -ion's I laid out as the reason for naming the company ION in his description so he has my thanks for spreading the gospel. But, if you think about it, a conference on the matter is participation so that means all four are included.
Open Access Week is in its fourth year so go to their site and check it out. Good things happen when people care about making a difference.
(1) Yet only a puzzling 2300 are article searchable, which seems to make no sense.
It's Open Access Week!
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